Kwame Anthony Appiah

Cosmopolitan

A Princeton library reading room, 2002, afternoon sunlight on long oak tables, African masks and Western philosophy tomes side by side, scholars in quiet conversation. — The world is one neighborhood.

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Appiah was born in London to a Ghanaian father and English mother, raised in Ghana, educated at Cambridge, and has spent his career between Princeton, NYU, and a dozen other institutions. His work on cosmopolitanism argues that loyalty to one's culture and loyalty to humanity as a whole are not opposites: you can be attached to what is yours without requiring it to be universal. He has written on race — arguing against racial essentialism while taking racial identity seriously — on honor and the history of moral revolutions, and on what it means to live well. He is among the rare philosophers who writes for general audiences without condescension, who treats the reader as capable of following the argument and drawing their own conclusion. His father left him a letter asking him to keep the family's connections to Ghana, which he reads as an instruction about what inheritance means: you can accept a legacy without being defined by it.

Moment

2002–14·Princeton

Princeton professorship and Cosmopolitanism

Appiah joined Princeton's philosophy department in 2002. He published Cosmopolitanism in 2006, making the case for a liberalism that values cultural difference rather than requiring its erasure. His background — raised between Ghana and England, son of a Ghanaian politician and an English writer — shaped a philosophy that took hybridity as a fact and a value.

Words

“We do not need, have never needed, to agree on everything in order to act together.”
— Kwame Anthony Appiah

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